As part of continuing efforts to work together this election year, several groups on campus have provided a shuttle service to take students to election sites.
The Student Government Association has funded a cooperative effort between the College Republicans and University Democrats to make the shuttles possible. The buses will have several stops, running from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.
“We realized that the most important thing is to get students to vote, whether they vote Democrat or Republican. We just want to provide a public service for students to vote,” Tyler Hempfling, University Democrats finance director, said.
This is the final part of SGA’s three-phase plan for the election, which as a whole would not have been possible without cooperation between Republicans and Democrats, said SGA President Chris Wilkey.
“What we are providing is a simple way for students to get there,” Wilkey said. “We just want to have Ball State have the largest turn out ever this year.”
Kayleigh Mohler, College Republicans president, said her organization was interested in making sure everyone votes.
Mohler said the group was approached in the spring about the partnership with the University Democrats.
“We thought if we were going out and registering all these students, it would be nice for them to have a way to get to the polling stations,” Mohler said. “Students aren’t thought of as a main voting group. If we were going to educate everyone, we thought it was silly to just stop everything on Election Day.”
As well as providing transportation, SGA will have several members throughout campus handing out information about voting and informing students of the bus route.
There will be a stand set up at the Scramble Light staffed by SGA members who will host a straw poll questioning students about their votes.
Anyone who is upset by the results throughout the day will can board the shuttle and vote to change the outcome, Wilkey said.
Wilkey said the first two phases of the plan had great turnouts. SGA hosted an event that had almost 500 students register to vote and also hosted a forum to inform voters about the different parties.
“We helped several students who thought they were Republican but found out they were a Democrat or vice versa,” Wilkey said. “This was a huge bipartisan event, where both parties allowed students to get honest answers to honest questions.”
Wilkey weighed heavily the importance of the ability of the two partisan groups to work together this year, citing several examples where projects only could have happened with the partnership between Republicans and Democrats.
“People look at Congress or Washington, and they see all of this arguing between parties,” Wilkey said. “But seeing that college students have it down enough to see they need to work together to make things happen is a big deal.”
